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“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it”
- Frank Herbert (Dune)
Satellite images acquired by the Landsat 7 satellite
via butdoesitfloat
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
— Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence (1950)
A variant of Lady Lovelace’s objection states that a machine can ‘never do anything really new’. This may be parried for a moment with the saw, ‘There is nothing new under the sun’. Who can be certain that ‘original work’ that he has done was not simply the growth of the seed planted in him by teaching, or the effect of following well-known general principles.
— Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence (1950)
(Source: Wikipedia)
Quantum key distribution (QKD) uses quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. It enables two parties to produce a shared random secret key known only to them, which can then be used to encrypt and decrypt messages. It is often incorrectly called quantum cryptography, as it is the most well known example of the group of quantum cryptographic tasks.
An important and unique property of quantum distribution is the ability of the two communicating users to detect the presence of any third party trying to gain knowledge of the key. This results from a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics: the process of measuring a quantum system in general disturbs the system. A third party trying to eavesdrop on the key must in some way measure it, thus introducing detectable anomalies. By using quantum superpositions or quantum entanglement and transmitting information in quantum states, a communication system can be implemented which detects eavesdropping. If the level of eavesdropping is below a certain threshold, a key can be produced that is guaranteed to be secure (i.e. the eavesdropper has no information about), otherwise no secure key is possible and communication is aborted.
The holometer attempts a direct experimental test of one form of [the holographic universe] hypothesis. In a Michelson interferometer, a light beam is split into two parts that travel in different directions, then are brought back together. The vibrations of light in the two directions tend to drift apart by about Planck length per Planck time when they are traveling in different directions. When they are recombined, the difference in light phase can be measured. In the holometer, signals from two different interferometers — that is, two completely separate systems, each with its own pair of beam arms — are compared. If they are close enough to probe the same volume of spacetime — that is, if light in both systems is traveling in about the same direction, at about the same time — their signals should display the same, correlated jitter, sometimes called ‘holographic noise.
